Saturday, August 26, 2006

Art, Beer and History: All you need for a great weekend read

Painting, movies, literature, sculpture, music, architecture ... all have the ability to make us cry, to make us laugh, and -- just occasionally -- to make us feel ten-feet tall. Why is great art so powerful? -- why does it have this profound ability to affect us? And who needs it? Find out in this short but succinct account.

What is the meaning of life? Why was civilisation begun? The answer of course is blindlingly simple: beer. It was for this that man came down from the trees.

"In the beginning all that existed was savagery and raw steak. With beer and bread was ushered in civilisation. (Bread and circuses were to come some time later, when politicians first figured out how to bribe people with their own money.)"

Read this two-part piece analysing history through the sometimes foggy lens of mankind's diverse delights.

Enjoy. And if you enjoy enough I'll get on to finishing Part Three.

UPDATE: Links fixed (Yes, I know, "Stupid bastard can't even get the links to two articles right." Sigh.)

Friday, August 25, 2006

Beer O'Clock: Founders Long Black

"Another week, another beer. This time we’re back across this side of the ditch, in Nelson, and it’s totally my choice," writes Stu from Real Beer.

Nelson has a long and distinguished brewing history. These days it is both the home of the country’s commercial hop production and of Mac’s Brewery – where the rebirth of craft beer in New Zealand took place. As well as Mac’s Brewery, who now brew in several other locations throughout the country, there are several small and independent brewing operations in Nelson.

The most easily accessible of the smaller operations is the Duncan family’s Founders Brewery. Based in Founder’s Historic Park the brewery offers a strong sparkling cider alongside four beers: the nutty brown Generation Ale; the biscuity, grassy hopped, Vienna-style Red Head; a fruity hopped German-styled Tall Blonde; and my personal favourite the German dark lager Long Black.

The Long Black pours a mysterious deep dark brown, very nearly black, with a thick and persistent tan head. The clean nose is toasty and grainy, reminding me of coffee and toasted muesli (which helps justify you drinking it before midday, if you feel so inclined). The flavours follow suit completely with clean, dry toasted graininess, a touch of bittersweet dark chocolate, and a soft hop bitterness that is thoroughly approachable. It’s a great dark beer to try if you think you don’t like dark beers.

I visited the brewery’s lovely little cafe on a perfect spring evening last year, where the beers were tasting incredibly fresh and smelling divinely biscuity - quite different from anything else I’d tried in New Zealand. A friendly tour and a huge free platter of nibbles (thanks to them over-catering a function) made it the perfect way to end an enjoyable bike trip around Nelson’s breweries. I’d certainly recommend a visit to anyone who is in the region. Otherwise you can pick the beers up in most reasonable supermarkets and bottle stores.

A golden cocktail

The 'Minted' cocktail -- a vanilla and chocolate Martini on sale at the Mint Bar in central Dublin's Westin Hotel -- includes vanilla-infused vodka, 200-year-old cognac and flakes of 23-carat gold. The drink comes in a designer crystal glass with chocolate truffles served on the side.

Balls to Kiwisaver

Pity we couldn't have got a two-for-one deal and got Michael Cullen done at the same time.

Brilliant. And it carries on our 'balls' theme beautifully from recent days.

PS: Why would you rely on the details when as we know every government scheme like this that's ever been set up anywhere has very quickly changed from what it was initially to something quite different, something that suits whichever government of the time that's administering the thing that week.

And whatever the details this week, why on earth would you trust any government on something so important and involving such long-term personal consequences when it's crystal clear their own planning or thinking doesn't extend past the next headline?

Drinking at the Hitler Bar

A few years back when we staged a Walk for Capitalism around Princes Wharf and Auckland's Viaduct, the Herald was amused that we didn't "darken the door" of the popular Lenin Bar. Asked why by the Herald reporter, one of the walkers replied, "If someone opened a bar called Hitler, would that be tasteful?"

Now I thought that was a good rhetorical question -- why would you want to drink in a bar whose name celebrates totalitarianism and mass murder? Well, ask the patrons of the Lenin Bar? And now ask too the patrons of the new Hitler's Cross Restaurant in Mumbai, India, where Yahoo News reports "local politicians and movie industry types were on hand to celebrate [its opening] beneath the posters of the Nazi leader and swastikas."

Private Members Bill: What's yours?

No political junkie could have missed all the Private Members Bills that in the absence of a real direction from this corrupt Government have been focusing the minds of politicians in recent months.

Even a party with just two people can write a Private Members Bill that can be drawn from the ballot and have some chance of success. All it takes is one MP with one good idea and sufficient lobbying to get half the MPs in Parliament to vote for it -- and even an unsuccessful Private Members Bill has the ability to achieve results on your own favourite issue, as Rodney's Rates Capping Bill has done.

So I have a question for all you political junkies whose enthusiasm is for ideas rather than personalities: If you were an MP -- Galt help us all! -- then on what topic would your Private Members Bill be? What would you most want to achieve with a new law?

Post your answers below, and I'll post mine on Monday. (And I'll give you a clue about mine: it would include the words 'Codification' and 'Abolition.')

"Clark stole election," says Brash

Audrey Young is still on the case, reporting from yesterday's Questions in the House that,

National launched a fevered attack on Prime Minister Helen Clark in Parliament yesterday, accusing her of having "stolen" the election through Labour's taxpayer-funded $446,000 pledge card, which was recently declared unlawful by the Auditor-General in a draft report.

National leader Don Brash led the attack, ending in a demand for a fresh and fair election...

"Helen Clark stole the election. Not content with enormous bribes to voters with other people's money, she had to misappropriate half a million dollars of taxpayers' money to fund her campaign. She should pay the money back," he said, the trigger for his own MPs to repeat the chant.

"She should then resign, go to the country and have a fair election."

Meanwhile, John Armstrong reports that the response to the questioning was so noisy that many MPs couldn't hear the Q and A.

But then you did not need to be able to hear Dr Cullen to know what he thought of the afternoon's proceedings.

It was enough to observe his increasingly vein-popping demeanour, finger-pointing indignation and facial complexion turning puce to match the tie around his neck.

Inside the Googleplex

What goes on inside the Googleplex? The 'Googleplex' is the name for Google's headquarters, in which some pretty smart people produce some pretty sharp stuff -- and seem to have a great time doing it if this seven-minute video is any indication. (Looks like they're looking for staff.)

The open and creative nature of the Google workplace and of Google's success seems to be attributed by most commentators to the characters and personalities of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin -- and guess what: they're Montessori graduates. Asked in a TV interview about the reason for their success, they told interviewer Barbara Walters "it was their going to Montessori school where they learned to be self-directed and self-starters. They said that Montessori allowed them to learn to think for themselves and gave them freedom to pursue their own interests."

Rex Haig conviction: what does it say about capital punishment?

The release of Rex Haig might cause some of you advocates of capital punishment to have a rethink. Let Nick Kim's cartoon make my point:

At least, it should cause you to rethink. Shouldn't it? No argument that murders forfeit any rights to their own life, of course they do, but the nature of our criminal justice system is that mistakes will happen, and even the best criminal justice systems have a history of such mistakes, and innocent people are convicted.

"The problem involved," suggested Nathaniel Branden some years back, "is that of establishing criteria of proof so rationally stringent as to forbid the possibility of convicting an innocent man." And the problem is that no criminal justice system, however good, can provide such a guarantee. It is not epistemologically possible -- that is, the nature of knowledge makes such a guarantee impossible.

In a nutshell: It's hard to give an innocent man his life back when you've already taken it in error. And it's impossible not to make errors.

(I participated in a valuable online debate on this matter a year or so back. Have a peek if you want more of the argument.)

Oh, and let me just give my best wishes to Mr Haig. I hope you can now get on with getting your life back.

Inconvenient truths

"The glaciers are melting!" Well, of course they are. That's what glaciers do.

"No, no, Greenland's glaciers are melting, and it's global warming!!" Well, yes they have been shrinking ... for at least a hundred years. And guess what: "the biggest reduction was observed between 1964 and 1985." During that period I think you'll find the world was slightly cooling. Hmmm.

"And, and, snowfall in Antarctica is increasing/decreasing/showing clear signs of global warming!!" Well, no. Not true either. In fact, "There were no statistically significant trends in snowfall accumulation over the past five decades, including recent years for which global mean temperatures have been warmest."

Made for the enjoyment of his family, this unique fantasy painting is one of Lloyd's most ambitious works. The last giant moa has fallen, its body watched over by a gathering of native birds and patupaiarehe, mythic Maori fairy folk. The cacophony of squawks and cries is almost audible. Lloyd captures the personalities of the various birds: the pukeko, a little stand-offish, looks on inquisitively; the gregarious kea shares the news with a late arrival still in flight; and the kakapo, notoriously shy and retiring, sits on the outer edge of the group. ('Enduring Nature: Hoki Atu Hoki Mai,' 2004)

LINKS: Works by Trevor Lloyd - Auckland City Art Gallery (just type in 'Trevor Lloyd' and hit the 'Search' button)

UPDATE 3: Well I'm not sure what it says about the young man, except perhaps that he's been hard at it today, but Whale Oil has a full gallery of backs, boobs, bikes and bimbos posted for your viewing pleasure. I won't say "enjoy" since I'm sure you'll only visit in the interest of keeping yourself abreast of events.

Rates Rant. Parental Advisory.

You know, watching Penn & Teller's 'Bullshit' more regularly has the potential to make me even more acerbic than normal. Combine Penn-&-Teller-viewing and reading the wit and wisdom of the only mayor in the country with a face like a cat's arse, and I'm likely to head into orbit.

For instance, re-reading over a late lunch the Herald's front-page story on the rates inquiry proposed by the Nats and the Greens (and now Labour), I could feel my blood pressure rising when I realised that Dickwhack Mother Bloody Hubbbard just sees any inquiry as a chance not to bring rates down from their ever-more-stratospheric heights, but instead to put his motherfucking hand further into ratepayers' and taxpayers' pockets -- pockets already being well-fucking-stolen from.

He "welcomed the enquiry" said Dickwhack. Why? "It may be that a select committee will put more urgency and a bit more grunt into the whole question." Oh yes?

The main issue he wanted to see addressed was [get this] a form of direct and guaranteed grants from the Government so councils did not have to go cap in hand on a project-by-project basis to Wellington... An inquiry should also look at other sources of money, such as bed and utility taxes, GST on rates, regional funding issues for Auckland and rates on Crown-owned properties.

So just to clarify: what this already fucking overspending mayor wants "addressed" is not methods by which his flagrant overspending and sheer fiscal bloody incompetence can be reined in, but ways in which his already well-off-fucking-piste council can spend and steal and spend and steal even more!!

How about THIS for a solution to your problems you fucking thieving cat's arse: STOP SPENDING SO GODDAMN FUCKING MUCH!!

Feel free to write to His Worship expressing similar sentiments at these addresses:

Balls tampering

Cactus Kate has thoughts about cheating at cricket: the length of Pakistani cricketers' fingernails, how Imran gets up her nose (and a few other places), how the English cheat ... oh, go on, just read it.

The illiterate teaching illiteracy

Anyone doubt that the same tests here would show the same problems? If there really is a 'tragic cycle' at work in our society, then it's the illiterate teaching illiteracy to and the innumerate teaching innumeracy ... and this country's Teachers' Colleges continuing to put their heads in the sand about the cause of the tragedy: Them and their methods.

STUFF: "NZQA figures show nearly 30 per cent of enrolled level-one NCEA pupils did not achieve the minimum literacy standard last year."

We've seen headlines like these for at least ten years now, haven't we? The current generation of illiterates are already out there teaching the next one, aren't they?

But does anyone really care enough to stop it happening? The minister in charge cries crocodile tears while the shadow minister blusters without direction or purpose, and meanwhile NZ children, generation after generation, are forced to attend the state's factory schools, and emerge with their minds turned to mush.

And so it goes on.

PS: See how you do on the three sample questions from the Trainee Teachers' test. Here at the foot of the BBC page.

Milton Friedman likes Don Brash

Uber-economist Milton Friedman admires Don Brash. True. While not resiling from his "passive monetary policy: Thou shalt abolish the Federal Reserve," Friedman attributes the "better performance in monetary policy over the past twenty years or so ... primarily [to] the recognition by central banks worldwide that they have responsibility for inflation."

And how did that happen, says Friedman?

My aphorism, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon,” was converted from an object of derision to a near truism. This experience was of course strongly reinforced by the leadership shown by Alan Greenspan in the United States, but also I believe by the leadership shown by Donald Brash in New Zealand.

The under-endowed Overlander

Years ago I remember Bob Jones praising the Auckland-Wellington overnight train (now called The Overlander) as the very best way to travel intercity. Jump aboard in one city, he said, enjoy an early evening drink, head for your bed and arrive downtown in good time in your city of business, fighting fit and fresh as a daisy and already in the heart of the city and ready to go.

It must also be remembered that this was in the years when Bob had a thing about the 'ugly fat woman policy' that the local government airline monopoly NAC seemed to pursue in hiring hostesses -- apparently hair-lips and big arses abounded -- so bear in mind that competition with the airlines was not exactly hot stuff.

My point, if I have one, is that times have changed. Intercity airline travel is better than it's ever been. Meanwhile, the standard of intercity rail travel is perhaps worse than it ever was -- sleeping cars for instance joined the Dodo some years ago. Now, speaking personally I think that's a shame, but my thoughts and feelings on the matter really butter no parsnips, and neither should the thoughts or feelings of others. Cash might help, but pleasant thoughts on their own pay no bills, do they.

Jeanette Fitzsimplesimons's meditations certainly pay no bills. Clutching a petition to her chest and an exhortationary crease across her brow, The Simplesimons opines: “It is easy to forget how essential the Overlander is to the communities along the route.” Great. If it's "essential" to them then presumably they'll be happy to stump up some dosh to help keep the service running then? No? Ah, apparently that's not what Fitzsimplesimons was meaning.

How about The Kedgley? "New Zealanders from every walk of life obviously feel very attached to this train service," she says, petition in hand. "They don't want to see it scrapped. Travelling by train up and down the island is an experience they value, and they want their children to enjoy it in future." So how are they expressing their attachment? Perhaps by delving into their piggy banks, or their spare venture-capital funds?

Apparently not.

Apparently the "value" that people place on The Overlander is not one you can measure, and certainly not the same value they place on not wasting their own money. After all, if people truly saw a value in The Overlander then nothing stops them clubbing together with their own money and putting together a proposal to Toll to help keep the service running. If all they say is true about the number of people to whom this service is essential, then the number of people willing to club together should be enormous, shouldn't it?

But it's not true, is it. It's just hyperbole isn't it. No one does value it as much as Jeanette and Sue say they do. In fact, to pinch a line from Penn & Teller, what they're saying is plain and simple, straight up and down, nothing more than hot air and Bullshit!

It gets them some good headlines though, doesn't it.

* Liberty Scott has a similar though much more politely expressed position, and with all the details you've come to expect from Scott. Check it out here.

Top Googling

As usual, some interesting searches amongst the most popular ones landing here at 'Not PC.' As usual, Annette Presley and Frank Lloyd Wright feature highly. And also as usual there's the occasional psycho in charge of a keyboard -- and here I refer to the person searching for Rolf Harris.

'The Young Diana,' by Anna Hyatt Huntington

The Gardens were set up in 1930 by New York industrialist Archer Huntington and his sculptor wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington, as a natural outdoor setting for Mrs. Huntington's sculpture and for the preservation of southeastern flaura and fauna. It was the first 'public' sculpture garden in the US.

Welfare isn't working

When Government's 'Trim the DPB' campaign began back in 1995, there were 102, 000 people on the DPB. Now? There are still 102, 000 on the DPB, and several thousand more bureaucrats to help administer the various 'Trim the DPB' campaigns devised since then.

What else? Back in 1995 the Government introduced "bold new measures" to "reduce the number of sickness beneficiaries," then totalling 74,000. What's the result, eleven years later? There are now 122,000 people receiving a sickness benefit.

As Lindsay concludes:

The government should STOP doing whatever it is they do. They just manage to make matters worse.

They sure do. Over the last ten years around $150 billion has been taken from taxpayers and spent in a war on poverty, and it's a war that no one is winning; not the government, not the taxpayer, and if recent studies are correct, not the 200-300,000 or so who've been the targets of this war over the last ten years: according to those studies, and despite the vast sums being spent fighting poverty, over the last five years for example the number in "severe hardship" has become both more numerous, and worse off.

That's $150,000,000,000 -- enough to have given every beneficiary in the country a massive $500,000 each to start their own war on poverty, and it still hasn't worked. It just hasn't worked. To paraphrase PJ O'Rourke,

the spending of this truly vast amount of money -- an amount more than half again the nation's entire gross national product in 1995 -- has left everybody just sitting around slack-jawed and dumbstruck, staring into the maw of that most extraordinary paradox: You can't get rid of poverty by giving people money.

When do we realise that government welfare doesn't work -- not for anyone -- and least of all for those who it is supposed to help.LINKS: It's pathetic - Lindsay MitchellLabour has failed the poor - No Right Turn (Idiot/Savant)Excerpt from 'How to endow privation' from PJ O'Rourke's book 'Parliament of Whores'

McCarten finds reason in the irrational

Matt McCarten has realised we are at war, and he's chosen sides: he's on the side of new "socialist friend," Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, the general secretary of Hizbollah, the Lebanese para-military organisation armed by and answerable only to its paymasters in Iran and its quartermasters in Syria; whose 10,000 or so rockets full of ball-bearings were fired freely into the population of Northern Israel for several weeks; whose cadres spent the last six years and many Iranian petro-dollars preparing for this conflict -- an aggressive supra-governmental paramilitary who are now refusing to disarm, despite it being an express condition of the cease-fire agreement signed by both sides.

McCarten sees Hezbollah as the solution, not the problem. End the "occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine" says McCarten, echoing his new hero, or else expect permanent war. "So long as there is imperialism in the world, a permanent peace is impossible," McCarten quotes Nasrallah approvingly -- Nasrallah's is the "new voice of Islamic reason," says NZ's voice of old-school socialist un-reason, a voice he says that "resonates with indisputable reason." This is McCarten's assessment of the butcher-in-chief's re-stated intention to wipe Israel off the map and to engage in "permanent war" until he does.At least we now know for sure which side McCarten is on. The side of the loons. The side of Islamic totalitarianism. The side of those who adamantly refuse to recognise any right for Israel to exist. The side of those who fight in the name of jihad. If there is one primary reason for permanent war in the Middle East, it is that view -- a view that McCarten shares. If there is one primary reason for the war with Islamic totalitarians being exported to the rest of the world, it is the idea that there is somehow "reason" on their side.

Place the blame for war where it lies: with those whom McCarten supports, and with those like him who give them ideological house-room. The bodies of the dead can be laid at their feet.

MEANWHILE, Cox and Forkum have a response to cries in the recent conflict of there being a 'disproportionate response':

Sunnis shooting Shiites

Who opens fire on an unarmed group of people going about their business? Apparently the practitioners of a religion of peace and love do. Says CNN:

Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims crowded the streets of the Iraqi capital, heading to the shrine of an eighth century imam... Gunmen on the streets and snipers from the rooftops opened fire on the crowds in six Baghdad neighborhoods, police said.

And who were those gunmen? They were Sunni Islamists -- including (it would seem from CNN's pictures) at least one Sunni imam with a pistol -- whose imaginary friend had told them to massacre Shi'ite Islamists. Such is the way this religion of peace fights a war of ideas.

Iraq's liberation from Saddam's tyranny left Iraqis free to succeed, free to flourish, free to make their own mistakes. It seems that, as with the liberation of Yugoslavia from Tito's yoke, too many of the newly-free are eager only to loot, to bomb and to kill -- and to kill in the name of their religion.

I finished my beauty sleep early this morning to have breakfast with Sue Bradford, Ruth Dyson, Wayne Mapp, Rodney Hide and about a hundred or so others. The event was a debate on Wayne Mapp's 90-day Probationary Employment Bill, for which Ruth Dyson argued we should listen to the facts.

The fact is that every business and every entrepreneur survives by taking a risk; by seeing a new vision or a new idea, assessing it, and then backing their judgement. The fact is that present employment law does not favour taking risks in whom employers choose to hire, because as too many Employment Court decisions have shown, letting an unsuitable employee go is a about as easy as getting Helen Clark to admit she shouldn't have spent taxpayers' money on her Pledge Card -- and can be almost as expensive a process.

The fact is that in in the present legal environment every employer who has to choose between someone well-qualified but dull and someone else less-qualified and less-experienced but perhaps a little sharper is more likely to see the nice-but-dull candidate signing the Employment Contract, and the more 'risky' candidate being shown the door. Present law favours nice-but-dull, and lowers the boom on candidates who need a risk taken on them. Those more risky candidates are finding it hard to get a toe on the employment ladder, and the fact is that present employment law is helping to making that happen.

We all suffer by that -- employers, manufacturers, employees and consumers -- but there is one group who suffer most, and despite the great boon this bill would offer them, they are not going to be listening to 'nice but dull' Wayne promoting it.

Who stands to benefit most? Let's have a look. Government figures show an unemployment rate of only 3.6%. At the same time, there are nearly 300,000 people are either on a benefit or otherwise unemployable. Whatever your view on the facts of economic growth under Labour or the truth of those particular figures, there is one figure that no one is challenging: 27% of young Maori are unemployed -- they are under-skilled, under-experienced, under-qualified (and in too many cases criminally-qualified) -- they are the very group of people who most need employers to be free to take a chance on them, and the very group that present employment law is helping keep unemployed. But they aren't listening to Wayne.

There's someone who might listen to Wayne though who could make a tangible difference. The Maori Party could with some justice call present employment law racist -- and in this case they might actually be right. It's targeted against the very group the Maori Party claim to represent. It makes life worse for them. Wayne Mapp's Bill would do more for under-skilled and under-qualified young Maori than any hundred government programmes aimed at closing their gaps -- it would give them the chance at real employment, and the chance for many of them to turn their lives around.

Khalifa Sports Center Tower - Roger Taillibert

The Khalifa Sports Center Tower, designed for the 2006 Asian Games in Doha, Quatar, by French architect Roger Taillibert, the designer of stadia for the Montreal Olympics and of Paris's Parc de Prince stadium.

Taillibert talks of his sports stadia as "Game Space" ...

a place where man can unleash, either in shelter or in the open, his definitive physical performances.

Monday, August 21, 2006

Nicole Kidman is hot

Nicole Kidman is hot.

Instead of hand-wringing or trying to duck making moral judgement (as so many others around the place have done), Nicole and 84 other Hollywood types took out a full-page ad in the LA Times laying responsibility for the deaths in the recent conflict squarely on the shoulders of the aggressors: Hezbollah and their vicious friends.

Mel Gibson was not among the 85 signatories.

[Nicole Kidman], joined by 84 other high-profile Hollywood stars, directors, studio bosses and media moguls, has taken out a powerfully-worded full page advertisement in today's Los Angeles Times newspaper.It specifically targets "terrorist organisations" such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine.

"We the undersigned are pained and devastated by the civilian casualties in Israel and Lebanon caused by terrorist actions initiated by terrorist organisations such as Hezbollah and Hamas," the ad reads."If we do not succeed in stopping terrorism around the world, chaos will rule and innocent people will continue to die.""We need to support democratic societies and stop terrorism at all costs."

More drugs, less crime?

New York's crack epidemic of the late eighties undoubtedly contributed to a huge rise in crime figures. Crack, as you will recall, is illegal.

So is heroin. But in recent years for several geo-political reasons increasing amounts of low-cost and very pure heroin has been hitting New York's streets, and as one correspondent to the Spectator points out, this "quasi legalisation" of heroin has been accompanied by ... what do you think: a drop in crime figures.

So what do you think? Could it be that what's being too much overlooked in the link everyone sees between illegal drugs and crime is the 'illegal' rather than the drugs? That's the answer given by the correspondent, who points out: "Heroin is more widely available than at any time in history -- probably more than if it were legal. Addicts simply do not have to commit so much crime to feed their habit."

And that's also the position of the criminal justice profesionals from LEAP (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) who argue that, "We believe that to save lives and lower the rates of disease, crime and addiction, as well as to conserve tax dollars, we must end drug prohibition."

Lebanese Huda Al-Husseini wrote in Al-Sarq Al-Awsat: "Lebanon has been taken hostage by Hizbollah, Syria and Iran and Islam itself has almost become a hostage to Iran's aspirations."

Egyptian Hazem Abd Al-Rahman wrote in Al-Ahram: "All Iran wants is to extend its hegemony over the eastern Arab countries, and it is trying to use Hizbollah as a Trojan horse to achieve his aim."

He concludes,

The Sunni countries are anxious to contain Iran.

It is ironic that Israel is playing a role on the side of the moderate Sunni states in this new power play in the Middle East.

The least Mr Fisk could do is to let readers know about the thinking of the Sunni Arab press.

But as I'm sure Prof. Bing is aware, Mr Fisk is never one to tell all the relevant facts, not when cherrypicking them gives him a better story. Read Prof Bing's whole piece in the Herald here.LINK: Dov Bing: Coup fear creates new allies - NZ Herald [Hat tip Whale Oil]

Darnton on air

UPDATE:Whale Oil notes that Helen Clark now has a new defence. In response to Paul Holmes question this morning asking whether she intends to pay back the money spent on the Pledge Cards she responded, "Mmm ... there's been no ... such ... request." Visit Whale Oil's post and you can hear the conversation for yourself. (Question and response about 5:30 into the linked audio.)

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Were Maori environmentalists?

A friend who wrote a thesis several years ago on common law solutions to environmentalism asked me this question a few weeks ago, and I've only recently got around to answering (I've paraphrased the question just a little):

Q: How did Maori activists [he asks] attain the apparent status they now possess in the environmental movement? In other words, why do NZ environmentalists bow to Maori prejudices? When I wrote my thesis this absurdity was not evident as it is now. Please can anybody shed some light on this?

So here's my rather belated answer.

On the facts of pre-European Maori environmental stewardship , the best I've read is a shortish piece by M.S. McGlone et al: 'An Ecological Approach to the Polynesian Settlement of New Zealand' published in The Origins of the First New Zealanders [Auckland University Press, 1994.] Unfortunately, it's not online (although I do quote from it briefly in this article), but it does rather give the lie to the idea of Maori as sound environmental stewards.

Take bird life for example.

"James et al estimate that untouched Oceania may have had more than 9000 bird species -- more than the total of surviving species on Earth today. Most of this incredibly rich fauna was eliminated by the direct or indirect effect of [pre-European] settlement... The amount of accessible fat and protein per square kilometre on a Pacific island may have been unequalled anywhere in the world...

Direct evidence exists for this superabundance of bird and marine resources on unexploited islands... In the initial settlement period [of New Zealand], the early abundance of bird bone must have represented a truly incredible exploitation rate... [Yet] NZ midden evidence shows that the consistent exploitation of birds in the late prehisoric results in few bird-bone remains...

The extinction of birds other than moa and of reptiles, and the shrinking of the range of many other species are well-attested (Cassels 1984)... the absence of these species in natural deposits such as caves, swamps and sand dunes after about 1,000 years ago strongly suggests early and vigorous depletion...

In summary: the birds were being killed and eaten in great numbers, in complete disregard it seems of any long-term consequences.

The case is the same for New Zealand flora. Slash and burn agriculture "rapidly destroyed much of the forest cover... By 600 years [Before Present] many animals had been driven to extinction or close to it, and very large areas of country, even in remote inland South Island valleys, were being burnt regularly... A degree of burning may been beneficial, for a [short] time at least."

However, over the longer term: "Extensive burning of inland valleys and ridges offered no obvious advantages in terms of food production..." The result of indigenous environmental stewardship over the longer term? Population grew rapidly in the North Island of NZ from 800 years BP, before slowing down about 400 years BP (following the major forest clearance phase) and plateauing about 200 years BP at about 100,000 when resources began diminishing (see graph at right).

After the initial settlement phase, New Zealand moved directly into a subsistence mode which characterised other island populations only during famine or when pushed into highly marginal lands... By the end of the prehistoric period New Zealand was no longer resource-rich, and the very scarcity of resources and reliance on hard-won wild foods had created a situation from which no larger political entities could easily arise.

So the idea of Maori as sound environmental stewards is not supported by the archaeological evidence. As 'sustainable' environmentalists they just weren't. So how to explain then the apparent status they now possess in the environmental movement? The reason is more widespread than is contained in environmentalism alone.

I think there's perhaps three legs in answer to the question, all related.

1. The Noble Savage

The first is the notion, first given currency by Rousseau, of the 'Noble Savage' -- the romantic idea of wild, untamed human creatures 'uncorrupted' by civilisation. It might be noted that this creation of 'romantic primitivism' was postulated entirely without evidence.

As Roger Sandall amongst others has noted, "A 'savage,'' untouched by civilization, would be akin to an animal, and neither noble nor a good role model for a society. By viewing civilization as something that corrupts or taints a person's pure or natural state, 'new tribalists' are succumbing, like Rousseau, to the romantic idea that the natural state of a human being, without the moderating effect of civilization, is somehow better. To the critics this notion is easily refutable, either by comparing human quality of life before civilization, or as humorist P.J. O'Rourke pointed out, by considering the natural state of children."

In Sandall's view, [summarises Wikipedia] romantic primitivism places far too high a value on cultures that were often characterised by, among other aspects, limited human rights, religious intolerance, disease and poverty. Other negative aspects he discusses include domestic oppression (usually of women and children), violence, clan/tribal warfare, poor care of the environment and considerable restriction on artistic freedom of expression.

Sentimentalism begets puerility. The ruthless scalpers of yesterday become Loving Persons. One-time ferocious fighters are discovered to be Artists at Heart. Hollywood becomes interested... Combined with this a suffocating religiosity now descends on public discussion, enforced by priests and judges, journalists and teachers, poets and politicians, all of whom claim that native culture possesses a “spirituality” found nowhere else. Soon the primitive is elevated above the civilized. In the words of one observer in New Zealand it is said that the whites “have lost the appreciation for magic and the capacity for wonder” while white culture, besides being “out of step with nature. . . pollutes the environment and lacks a close tie with the land.”

Few are unkind enough to note that “the imagined ancestors with whom the Pacific is being repopulated”—Wise Ecologists, Mystical Sages, and Pacifist Saints—“are in many ways creations of Western imagination.”

The second leg is specifically political, the idea that Lenin called 'The National Question' -- a specific strategy adopted by Marxist-Leninists to help destabilise a colonised country by use of the grievances, real or otherwise, of indigenous populations.

This movement came to attention in NZ in the late seventies (made most visible with the 'Treaty is a Fraud' movement), and you might say that reached its apogee under Neville Bolger's appeasing stewardship (when it suddenly transmogrified into an'Honour the Treaty' movement).

When mainstream Marxism collapsed following the collapse of the Berlin Wall -- and with it any claim that Marxist societies would ever be able to produce (or be good environmental stewards) -- rather than give up their authoritarianism, the custodians of 'The National Question' stampeded into local and overseas environmental movements, as I'm sure Trevor Loudon will attest. Consequently, the numbers of 'National Question' adherents and other fellow-travelers (the gullible type whom Lenin called Useful Idiots) who call themselves 'green' but are still red on the inside would seem to be quite large.

3. Multiculturalism

The third leg, related to and in some sense underpinning both, is the notion of 'multiculturalism' -- the idea that all cultures are equal (apart, that is, from the cultures of the west). 'Multi-culti is one of the many foolish notions of postmodernism, (encompassing both moral relativism and political correctness) that captured the academies in recent years.

Naturally when the least are made equal to the best, the least win out. If all cultures are asserted (without evidence) to be equal, then one is disarmed from finding evidence that would disprove such an assertion. To find and assert such evidence would, according to the multiculturalist, be 'racist.'

The consequence is this: If one is disarmed from judging a culture -- which is one of the goals of moral relativism -- then the worst cultures are left free from moral judgement, and moral judgement itself becomes bereft of any evidential-base: the only immorality to a multiculturalist is to challenge the assertions of multiculturalism. That too would be racist.

But as Thomas Sowell points out, you can judge cultures, and in fact if human life is our standard then morality demands that we should judge them.

Cultures [he insists] are not museum-pieces. They are the working machinery of everyday life. Unlike objects of aesthetic contemplation, working machinery is judged by how well it works, compared to the alternatives. The judgment that matters is not the judgment of observers and theorists, but the judgment implicit in millions of individual decisions to retain or abandon particular cultural practices, decisions made by those who personally benefit or who personally pay the price of inefficiency and obsolescence."

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Art, Beer and History: All you need for a great weekend read
Beer O'Clock: Founders Long Black
By a stroke of luck I'm off to Blenheim and Nelson tomorrow. Mmmm, beeer...
I can assure readers this was not a setup.

Honest. ;-)
Yes, the Founders Long Black is a lovely beer. I had my first one about a year ago in Kaikoura and was most impressed.

(If I remember, it's organic, also, which is unfortunately a bit PC, but great beer nonetheless :) )
I hope you manage to get in some local samples Bernard. Both Nelson and Blenheim are full of good little breweries. Unfortunately it's still hard to find a pub stocking their beer, though Blenheim supermarket is a beer mecca.

Check out the NZ breweries page at RealBeer.co.nz to find out the locals.
A golden cocktail
Anyone who uses 200 year old cognac in a cocktail needs to be shot with a ball of their own shit!
Bugger the cognac .. you don't drink gold .. you bloody well wear it!
Balls to Kiwisaver
Drinking at the Hitler Bar
Fidel's cafe?

oh, hold on...
You do realise that calling a waterfront pub is a deliberate exercise in irony, right? When I travelled through Russia it was common to see street vendors with shirts with 'McLenin'over the golden arches - typical Russian black humour. I think they'd get it too.

Still, PC, I'm surprised - you're all about power to the land owners. Surely it's none of 'the publics' business what a land owner names his business?
Good points polemic. Out of interest, how do you see irony playing a part in the naming of Lenin Bar? I'm just curious as to how you see it.

I'd like to know if Auckland City Council would allow a bar on the waterfront to be called Hilter or Pinnochet - seriously would they allow it? How about the Pol Pot Bar and Bistro? - the Khmer Rouge Disco? Hell, why not?
PC said...[New restaurant bears Hitler's name]

A relative of mine who lives in Ellerslie is called Winston Churchill and was born in 1941. His neighbour in the island named their son Adolph Hitler, who was born 2 months after Winston. Adolph Hitler lives in Mangere, but he only uses his first name (Adolph), I think that he is ashamed, now realising what his name is about. Talking to surviving elderly people from my village who are in Auckland about those 2 names, why their parents chose them, they said that at the time, the newspaper was published once a week. Every weekly paper had Churchill & Hitler on the front page side by side. People knew Hitler was the enemy, but perhaps they didn’t realise how evil he was. The gassing of the Jews was something that only emerged after the war, from film archives. Adolph Hitler has a brother in Otahuhu who has a son named Jehovah and the island church community are disgusted with that because they think it is a blasphemy against their religion (Methodist Church).

Naming something (person or a place) is a personal choice, and regardless of how other people think, it is their right to choose whatever sequence of alphabets they want to adopt for a name, however disgusting that might be.
I didn't see anything about PC's wanting to illegalize it--he just wouldn't patronize the place.
Leelion - because I somehow doubt that the owners of a wasterfront pub would extoll the virtues of a peoples revolution.

Let's just clarify a misconception that PC has spread, and Leelion picked up.. Lenin was an intellectual who championed the teaching of Russian no illiterate farmers, womens sufferage and the eletrification of the country-side. Later Soviet leaders would turn on their population as the Communist experiment failed.

Regardless of your opinions of the merits of Communism vs whatever, Lenin the man was not in the same League as Pol Pot, Hitler or Stalin Let's get our history right. So I don't support PC's axiom that Lenin is "a bar whose name celebrates totalitarianism and mass murder".
polemic, you're entitled to your opinion but I politely beg to differ. To quote Lenin:

"not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence."

Lenin was one of the most influential people in history. He was an intellectual but also a man of action who returned to Russia to take power.

He was the man who took the theories of Marx and translated them into political practice.

His actions in 1917 were an insidious foothold that lead to the communist expansion throughout the world until the late seventies - a disastrous expansion that enslaved millions.

During his brief five year rule he was responsible for several million deaths and established prison camps (gulags) for crushing political oppositon.

Stalin just carried on the good work. Cheers.
To quote the Black Book of Communism "from 1824 to 1917 the total number of people sentenced to death in Russia for their political beliefs or activities was 6360, of whom only 3932 were executed...These figures were surpassed by the Bolsheviks in March 1918, after they had been in power for only four months"

Another quote. Isaac Steinberg (Bolshevik) said "What is the point of a People's Commissariat for Justice? It would be more honest to have a People's Commissariat for Social Extermination. People would understand more clearly" "Excellent Idea" Lenin countered "That's exactly how I see it. Unfortunately, it wouldn't do to call it that"

Anyone who thinks Stalin started the murderous terror of the USSR is deluded. Lenin was just as bloodthirsty, Stalin had more time, more technology and didn't need to set up the state apparatus to enforce terror - he had it there to use.

Lenin is an intellectual, as much as Saloth Sar (Pol Pot), Khieu Samphan and the rest of the Khmer Rouge, who all studied at the Sorbonne. Intellectuals with the blood of millions on their hands - it is about time that Lenin be as villified as Hitler - all those that followed simply copied.
Indeed Scott & Leelion. Lenin is infamous for referring to the general public as 'useful idiots'. His current Kiwi counterparts do not appear to think any differently.

The good folk of St Petersburg were quick to rename Leningrad which just screamed greyness and jackboots.

Ah, Polemic .. don't you know that communists are just losers who've given up all hope of becoming capitalists! :)
Private Members Bill: What's yours?
Decriminalisation of Abortion Bill. Not the church, not the state (definitely not the state, or the bully pulpit either), women should control their bodies.

Craig Y.
I'd also suggest people check out my In the ballot series. There have been 58 bills put in the ballot this year (about 30 in at any one time), and I've covered 46 of them.

This is reminding me that I should do another legislative thinktank post as well.

The difficult bit is getting people to front for you. In your case, the natural front is ACT - but it seems they have a pile of legislation already waiting to go (seriously, Rodney gets a bill drawn, and he's got another one for the ballot the next week. I don't like him or his bills, but he's making sure he advocates his agenda...)

OTOH, you can always regard it as developing bills to use inthe unlikely event the LibertariaNZ are ever elected to Parliament (damn the 5% threshhold).
How about my Constitution (Executive Powers) Bill?
I would go with Bill of Rights (Insertion of Meaningful Property Rights) Amendment Bill.

Then I would have Restriction on Public Databases Bill. If you really knew what the Government knows about you - you would be terrified.
Firenze high speed rail station - Norman Foster
Getting your balls in a tangle
was his name Buster Gonad?
reminds me of the guy who won the Darwin Awards (though he didn't kill himself) a few years ago for using one of those rotating golf ball washers with the handle to wash his balls - with disastrous consequences
Hahaha. That chair really got him by the balls. there should be lifeguards watching out for these kinds of incidents to happen, we wouldn't want ourselves or some people we know to get into this kind of sticky situation.
at least the 'rescue' only involved cutting the deckchair in half...
"Clark stole election," says Brash
Inside the Googleplexguess what: they're Montessori graduates. Asked in a TV interview about the reason for their success, they told interviewer Barbara Walters "it was their going to Montessori school where they learned to be self-directed and self-starters. They said that Montessori allowed them to learn to think for themselves and gave them freedom to pursue their own interests."

Peter, given that you generally seem to be a strong supporter of the scientific method, I find your statement of evidence about Montessori schools a bit surprising. There is not a single piece of information that tells me that their success is due to their Montessori schooling. I have no problem with Montessori schools, but that evidence is as convincing to me as the evidence I have seen for Bach flower remedies."I find your statement of evidence about Montessori schools a bit surprising."

What I said Andrew was to tell you what they said. They're successful. They attribute a large part of that success to their Montessori schooling. That's what I reported.

If you have an argument with what they said then take it up with Larry Page and Sergey Brin. I'm sure they'll be happy to listen to your objections.You said:The open and creative nature of the Google workplace and of Google's success seems to be attributed by most commentators to the characters and personalities of Google founders Larry Bage and Sergey Brin -- and guess what: they're Montessori graduates.

You also said:Find a Montessori school here, and set your own kids on the path to success.

Your implication was clearly:

Here are some successful individuals, they went to Montessori, send your kids to Montessori to be successful.

I believe you are being disingenuous if you say that was never your point.
Perhaps you should read what I said Andrew. You began by saying "There is not a single piece of information that tells me that their success is due to their Montessori schooling."

I repeated to you the information related by Larry and Sergey themselves that they attributed their success to their Montessori education.

I suggested that if parents want to take advantage of Montesori education for their own children they should.

What is your problem with that? I don't deny at all what I said.

If it's "disingenous," then hang me, but to me you're having an argument with yourself, not with me.
No matter where they got their drive (and I don't doubt them when they say it came from their early schooling), they were also fortunate to be living in a country that values drive. You can go to Montessori schools around the world - but you'd need to immigrate to America to make the most of it.
Have you ever in your life admitted you're wrong?

I have come to the realisation it is pointless to try and have a discussion with you.

I give up, one less reader.
Peter, Eric Watson and Graeme Hart left school at 15.I have my doubts about the benefit of formal education.

I for one am well aware of the education of the Google two - interestingly Sean Coombs- aka P Diddy or whatever he calls himself these days- was also Montessori educated and he is another hugely successful 'brand'.

Also Montessori needs to be regulated to protect it- not all regulation is bad you know. Take the current finance coy debacle for example. Ppl need to know exactly what they are buying into, be it education or investment.
I am not entirely sure whether Brin & Page comment to Barbara Walters was just mention a brief description of their past.

I would say , that Google were just lucky. When they developed their 'PageRank' algorithm, which is the workhorse of the Google search engine, there was a similar algorithm published at the time in 1998 called 'HITS' (hypertext-induced topic selection) by Prof. John Kleinberg. HITS is the algorithm now used by search engine vendor as AskJeeves. 'PageRank' was used at Stanford Campus by Page&Brin and the word of mouth spread thru the campus about this robust search tool. It spread to other Universities, and on and on into the general public, and then GOOGLE as we know today was born. There were some individual backers that were keen to take a risk at the time and back this supposed 'Montessori' duo. The duo, kept rising and now they are at the top of the world. It is widely discussed in the search engine community (a misnomer as such community comprises of different disciplines - machine learning, scientific computing, Linear Algebra, Data mining, Artificial Intelligence, Information Retrieval) that if Prof. Kleinberg seeked seed capital from investors at the time to develop a commercial application using the HITS algorithm, Google would not be so dominated as today. Another algorithm that was published by Prof. Lempel and Prof. Moran not long after 'PageRank' & 'HITS' came out is 'SALSA' (Stochastic Approach for Link Structure Analysis). SALSA combines the features of PageRank & HITS.

So, I would like to link the Montessori school with the success of Brin & Page. I would say that they were accident to be there. I am not knocking Brin & Page, I do admire their success, which makes everyone in the IT circle want to emulate, including myself, but HITS & SALSA were reported to outperform Google at the time. I am sure Google has evolved their 'PageRank' since then. Had Kleinberg , Lempel & Moran pursued the same commercial vision as Brin & Page, we wouldn't see a dominant Google today. I think that Brin & Page are true entrepreneurs, where their discovery of the 'PageRank' is not to be ranked the same as Einstein discovery of 'General Theory of Relativity'.

Last but interesting. The main theoretical formulations behind all those search algorithms mentioned above could be traced back to Einstein in a paper he published in 1905 called 'Brownian Motion' (random walk) a 'Markov Monte Carlo' process. This is the same year that the great man published his other 2 well-known papers in 'Special Relativity' & 'Photo-electric effect' where he won a Nobel Prize for the latter in 1921. Brownian Motion is a dominant topic taught in fluid dynamics & statistical mechanics in physics. PageRank is modelled of how links are pointed from page to page and how a user might navigate from this page to the next one in a purely random walk (or in a Brownian motion manner). Linear algebra is then used to solved for the top-rank solutions of the transition probability matrix that a user might want to walk (navigate) in a random fashion manner from page i to page j . Perhaps if Einstein is still alive today, he would be amazed that his 'Brownian Motion' paper has been adopted by Economics Nobel prize winners Prof. Scholes & Prof. Merton for their discovery of the 'Black-Scholes' model , which is the modelling of stock price options where price do follow a Brownian motion. Also he would be fascinated with Page & Brin discovery of PageRank, which the model is based on Brownian Motions & Random Walk. Markov-Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a more general form of Brownian Motion.

You can observe Brownian motion at home. Brownian motion is responsible for diffusion in fluids. An example of this is if you put a drop of ink into a glass of water, then after a while you noticed that whole glass is coloured homogenously. If no brownian motion takes place then the ink drop at all time, would stay still on the spot of where it was dropped at . Diffusion by Brownian motion is achieved whether the drop of ink was placed at the bottom of the glass or from the surface. This is because ink molecules with their interaction with the fluid particles cause the ink to go for a random walk in all-possible directions in the container (the glass). Given enough time, they would have traversed all possible paths.

"Authority rankings from HITS, PageRank, and SALSA: Existence, Uniqueness, and Effect of Initialization"http://www.math.hmc.edu/~ward/paperpdfs/hitsheaderbw6Jan05.pdf

"Brownian motion"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion

"Markov Chain"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain
Falafulu Fisi said...[So, I would like to link the Montessori school with the success of Brin & Page. ]

I missed something in the above comment, so the correction is shown below.

"So, I would NOT like to link the Montessori school with the success of Brin & Page."
Andrew, you said: "Have you ever in your life admitted you're wrong? I have come to the realisation it is pointless to try and have a discussion with you. I give up, one less reader."

Well, I'm sorry you feel that way Andrew. Don't you think it's rather intemperate based only on a discussion in which we seemed to be talking at cross purposes? What exactly were you hoping for from your comments?
FF, you said: [An awful lot.] I think I need to educate you in the value of brevity. :-)

But nothing you say suggests what they said about the contribution of MOntessori education to their success is wrong.

Equally, the success of a company such as Google or Microsoft has as much to do with its codes and programmes as it has to do with its marketing and entrepreneurial flair -- as I'm sure you're only too aware.

As it happens, a proper Montessori education places great value on this all-round aspect of learning. :-)
Ruth you said, "Eric Watson and Graeme Hart left school at 15.I have my doubts about the benefit of formal education."

Oh, me too. Given that so many of NZ's richest people left school at fifteen and did an apprenticeship, the evidence seems to be pretty clear that having kids who wag school is less of a worry than kids who do everything without question, and never display any spirit at all. At least the kid wagging school is showing some character, and with schools as they are he's probably not missing out on much either. ;^)

Anyway, on this subject I recall Bob Jones's commenting on Ron Brierley's success: he said Brierly had managed to shake off the hindrance of a good education quite nicely.
I think that Page & Brin are very concerned at the moment about Microsoft. WHY? The giant has just awoken. Never anyone to underestimate Bill Gates, he is also late to the party (search engines), but most of the time come on top to dominate a particular software technology as has been shown in the past. Gates is late to the Gaming software and he is taking a direct challenge at the dominance of Sony by pushing hard his XBox software. Now, his new mission is Search Engines and he has declared that openly in recent times that he is going to take Google head on. It is war, as we know it. This will be good for the consumers, as prices for placed advertisements ,etc, will come down. Judging from what I have seen in numerous computing journals, the number of publications & papers that have come out of Microsoft Research Centre has increased probably ten-fold over the last 5 years or so. This means that Bill means business, and it is a clear warning to competitors (Google, Yahoo, and anyone else) to not feel complacent about their late coming to the party. Bill Gates has been portrayed as a follower in computing technology and not a leading innovator, however the game has changed and now, I see that he is a leading innovator. Microsoft Research Centre (MRC) does co-operate with researchers from other tertiary institutions and they do co-publish their work in computing peer review journals and made available to the public. Their proprietary work, is based on those publicly available papers, but are internal only to their product developments, that is they are not being published. When you see an algorithm that has been published by MRC, you can infer that there must be a deeper robust version of the algorithm that is not published because it is propriety and used only for product development. Regarding Google research, I have not seen any research from them being published. I am not sure if is their policy or not, but their internal research work is cutting edge & robust. I have seen both sides, Google & Microsoft expanding their R&D efforts. Google has been reported to be trying to establish an R&D facility in China and Microsoft has already done so. The number of publications coming out from Microsoft Research Centre China is huge and I think that Bill Gates definitely knows the available intellectual human resources in computing field to set-up an R&D facility there.

I have seen one publication (see link at the end) from Microsoft China R&D, which their paper described an algorithm that has outperformed the current 'PageRank' algorithm used by Google & Yahoo and also the 'HITS' algorithm used by AskJeeves. You can see the result of the benchmark on page 7 of the paper. The thing about scientific claims is that it can be verifiable and that means that any software developer (or vendor) can implement the algorithm described in the Microsoft paper and benchmark against Google, Yahoo or AskJeeves. The benchmark test described in their paper definitely shows the superiority of Microsoft algorithm in terms of precision compared to current 'PageRank' & 'HITS'. Precision is defined as the ratio of number of pages returned that is relevant to the query term to the number of total pages retrieved. Example, you can query the phrase ‘bank and money’ , then the engine retrieves pages that contain, say: ‘river bank’, ‘bank manager’, ‘the plane went into a steep bank’. There are total of 3 pages retrieved and only one is relevant. The precision is 33%. Only the page that contains ‘bank manager’ is relevant to the query terms ‘bank and money’ , because they have similar or same concepts as to mean a financial institution such as a bank , which has definitely a manager and their business involve currency or money , etc . The result ‘river-bank’ is irrelevant as it has no concept of a manager or money .Now, this is the version of the algorithm that Microsoft is publishing, but what about the version that is refined & perfected to be used internally for product development? We can only infer what they are upto. Microsoft has taken the search engine algorithm to a new level and no one should be surprised that Page & Brin are very concern for future of Google as the incumbent dominant player in search engine. Well I think , they should be. Whether Microsoft has deployed their algorithm for commercial use at this stage is unknown. The Microsoft paper (China R&D Centre) can be freely downloaded from link shown. The abstract of the paper is given, however the full paper in PDF (574 Kb) format can be downloaded as well:

So, Page & Brin, watch out for Bill who is after your seats.
Rex Haig conviction: what does it say about capital punishment?
Anybody who argues for capital punishment argues from the point of view that it acts as a deterrent to murder.

That is if you are caught you could be facing a death penalty.
You may argue it how you like, but the fact remains that every regime of capital punishment kills innnocent people, and you can't wish that fact away.
That has always been the strongest argument against the death penalty.

I've always thought a true life sentence was a far worse punishment than a quick death. Also the US experience shows it's actually a lot cheaper to lock a person up than it is to run a death penalty case to its ultimate conclusion.
Peter - if saving innocent lives is the object, and it should be, would you support the death penalty if it could be shown to save them? Recent research in the US (where the differences between juristictions allow such comparisons) shows that this is indeed the case. And, hold on to your seat, the numbers are absolutely amazing - the estimate is that around 14 innocents are saved per execution! If that is true then opposition to the death penalty is misguided.
Anonymous - not entirely true. You could argue for it on the grounds of 'incapacitation' too! That is, a dead killer is not going to kill again.
We can of course restrict capital punishment to cases where there's no arguing about the facts.

Caught in the act for example with witnesses other than the police.We can of course restrict capital punishment to cases where there's no arguing about the facts.

Caught in the act for example with witnesses other than the police.

No such thing, of course.

I'm of the opinion that the state should not be killing any citizen for any reason. Even if the cost of imprisonment is higher, the state must always maintain a basic moral baseline. Killing someone, regardless of the crime or certainty of their guilt shouldn't be a factor.

Just my view though.. :)
Berend - to qualify what I said about your post. What if the criminal was insane at the time, or someone threathened to kill his/her family unless they did this horrible thing, etc etc.

After some overnight thought, for mine there is still an enormous difference between what we might call a 'sin of omission' of the state in failing to deter a murder by not treating other murders harshly, and the state committing a specific 'sin of commission': namely, blithely and in cold blood killing all those who have been convicted of murder knowing that some proportion of those killed are entirely innocent.

I don't know of any state I would trust with that power.

Assuming for the sake of argument that the studies you cite are one-hundred percent true (as they may be for all I know), I guess here I come to those further objections I cite in that argument to which I linked in my post, specifically, the idea that the state should set itself up as a killer in cold blood, and in this case as a killer based on some sort of 'calculus of corpses.'

Given, as we all know, the tendency for the state to grow its powers beyond what it is originally allowed, I can see such a setup based on such a calculus being awfully dangerous.

For instance, on another list that I frequent, a contributor has been (correctly) criticising religionists and George Bush for holding up stem cell treatments that should save lives, but then (incorrectly) calling the religionists 'murderers,' since people are dying while stem cell researchers are forced by the religionists' legal challenges to sit around and twiddle their thumbs.

But using such a calculus as you propose would have all religionists (and George Bush) executed for holding up the research. After all, they're murderers too, right?

Would you agree with that?

And if you do, how about this: Similar arguments would exist for saying, for example, that those who had DDT banned -- which as you'll recall has led to the deaths of several million people due to malaria, which DDT had helped wipe out -- should also be in the gun (quite literally) for murdering all those people.

If we use your 'calculus of corpses' method then surely Rachel Carson, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund and the members of the United Nations Environment Programme should also be facing the chair?

So then, knowing that the chances of restricting the use of capital punishment once instituted would be enormously difficult, are you still happy to propose capital punishment on those terms?
Sean, another comment on that Becker thread is very relevant here. Again, let's assume for the sake of argument the validity of those studies

Said commenter Justin: "Add to the hypothetical equations a very real number. For each innocent person convicted for a murder, a real murderer or murderers are free to kill or harm others again. Once the penalty has been carried out the search for the perpetrators will likely never begin again. This is rarely addressed by police, prosecutors or judges that are proponents of the death penalty.

"However, an innocent man sentenced to life in prison may shout loud enough and long enough that someone will take notice and the investigation in to what really happened may take place. If this occurs, there is a chance that the real criminal may then be brought to justice at some point in the future. This chance seems to be virtually non-existent in the current system."
Peter - I understand your objection about giving the state the power of life and death but isn't that power a basic feature of any state? Laws have to be enforced - sometimes using deadly force. Why else do we arm the police?

To me, your argument smacks of "the perfect being the enemy of the good".

I'm also a little suspicious of rhetoric like your "blithely and in cold blood killing all those who have been convicted of murder" - especially when I'm not proposing anything of the sort.

It would not be done "blithely" - it would be done after "due process". It would not be done in "cold blood" - it would be done "humanely". And it would not be done to "all those convicted of murder" - it would only be done to those convicted of "premeditated murder".

Surely, if individuals have a right to use deadly force to protect life and limb, then the state has that right too?

As for your point about Bush etc. Sorry, but I don't see the connection between a discussion of state powers and responsibilities and the in/activism of individuals - however misguided.

Besides, I don't see the funding of research as a fundamental responsibility of the state - do you? If the Human Genome Project is anything to go by (and it is)- we're be better off with private industry doing the job anyway.

Finally, might I suggest that this is a subject best left to the will of the people? We should have a vote on it. I'm pretty sure how it would turn out - as do our 'rulers' - which is why it'll never happen!
I'm appalled - NO COMPENSATION for 10 years of being wrongfully convicted!

This is currently on the news, with the "official" announcement not expected until 3 pm today.

What does this say about the rights of someone who is wrongfully convicted in this country??!!
Inconvenient truths
Peter, I accept that it is entirely possible that your stance on global warming is correct. Do you accept the possibility that you may also be wrong, and that global warming is something that may have disastrous outcomes in the future.

I am not so sure either way, but I believe that entertaining the possibility of global warming is not a bad thing.

You seem so sure about something that just isn't your field of expertise.
I'm simply reporting the evidence as I see it, Andrew.

I'm sure you're aware that since it is impossible to prove a negative, the onus of proof is always on those making a claim -- in this case then the onus of proof is those who making the claim that man-made global warming exists, and the inconvenient truth about much of the evidence adduced to date is that it has been less than stellar.
Given that the data generated by research into global warming is observational at best, absolute proof for the existence of man-made global warming is not possible either. Even experimentally this isn't possible to proof (see the use of p-values in a lot of science). As for plausible evidence, I agree with you, it may not be all that convincing ... yet. But who knows what future research will tell us. I am not making any bets on this one yet. The immense number of variables and interactions between variables involved in something like man-made global warming in dizzyingly complex. For that reason I am cautious about accepting AND rejecting the possibility of global warming. And even if it is happening, we don’t actually know if that has positive or negative effects for us.

However, that was not my point. You seem very very sure that man-made global warming isn't happening, and never seem to accept that it may be possible. I just asked you if you thought it was possible.

Personally I don't believe in the existence of a god or a metaphysical soul. However, I would never claim that they don't exist.
But the onus of proof is always and must be on those making a positive claim, on those who say that so-and-so exists or so-and-so is happening.

It's just not possible to prove a negative, but it is possible to look at a claim about, say, glaciers melting in Greenland and say, "Nah, that's wrong."

You see, any claim that's made without evidence to support it is not a 'conditional' claim, it's simply an arbitrary pronouncement with no more claim to truth than claims about there being fairies at the bottom of the garden, or green spiders on the far side of Mars.

"Who knows what future research will tell us"? Who knows. All we have is current evidence. All we ever have is current evidence. And outside continually-revised computer modelling, there is no present evidence for man-made global warming, which makes any claims for its existence as arbitrary as claims about fairies in the garden, spiders on Mars, and the previously fashionable claims about man-made Global Cooling.
Yes, and those that make those claims are trying to get the evidence. I also think it is good that people challenge those findings. In fact, that is extremely important. I also support the existence of organisations like the Climate Science Coalition.

However, I sometimes wonder if your views on some issues can ever be changed. My point was that we can never prove man-made global warming, and that the best evidence we can possibly generate using observational research, will never be good enough for some people.

Example:We can't prove that smoking causes lung cancer. It would be nice to try and find some experimental evidence for this, but we can't ethically conduct such studies. Therefore we rely on correlational research.

The fact there is a relationship between smoking and lung cancer, and that non-smokers just don't get lung cancer (yes there may be one or two exceptions), on the face of it seems pretty convincing. However, the problem with that is that there is always some other possible explanation for the link between smoking and lung cancer. That is, people who take up smoking are different from those who don't, and it is that personality variable that may actually be responsible for the cancer. It is improbable, but possible. It took a very very long time for tobacco companies to publicly accept that smoking probably does cause lung cancer in some people. However, there is no proof.

Now given your desire to provoke, and knowing that you smoke, you probably don't believe the conspiracy theory that smoking causes cancer.

If that is so, I give up.

However, if not and you are willing to accept that global warming is a possibility, if you are provided with the evidence, maybe you could provide some idea of what, in your view, convincing evidence is.
Andrew said...[My point was that we can never prove man-made global warming, and that the best evidence we can possibly generate using observational research, will never be good enough for some people.]

I think that observational research is the norm of scientific investigations. However in todays environment, we are heavily rely on computer models to stretch our imaginations to domains that it is impossible to do experimentally. When you step, into the unknown using the model, then you come up with different possibilities of outcome. If the model is formed by wrong assumptions, then wrong outcome or conclusions will come out as a result. This happens all the time. When it happens, it is either improved or refuted by other researchers when they publish their peer review work. Climate modeling is a complex systems phenomena and it should be treated as such using the appropriate model.

Andrew said...[However, if not and you are willing to accept that global warming is a possibility, if you are provided with the evidence, maybe you could provide some idea of what, in your view, convincing evidence is.]

In my view , I have accepted that global warming is a possibility, but based on some papers I have read relating to the global-warming debate, I am not convinced that it is happening. I have dug deep into the mathematical modeling those pro-warming group have used and I am alarmed at many defects in the type of algorithms they used (perhaps, they were not aware of more recent robust ones available). For example, I have dug deep into the paper for 'hockey-stick' by Prof. Mann, et al where the Kyoto was based on, and I can see some improper techniques being used.

"Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past centuries."http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/mann1998.pdf

First is the use of PCA (Principal Component Analysis), which is a linear method that is inappropriated for non-linear data as weather.

Second, his paper is vaque about the transfer functions for AR (Auto-Regression) process. He mentioned AR but never gave any transfer function (ratio of the output to the input variable).

Third, he never clearly described how he dealt with missing data. The data collected from the period described in his paper had missing data and to run an analysis such as that, you first have to pre-process the data to take out outliers , where there was no clear description if he did or did not. If the outliers are not taken out it will have an influence in the outcome. If you run analysis on the unclean data, then you expect a huge error that might be caused by outliers present or missing values present. I had communicated with Professor Schneider of Caltech (Calfornia Institute of Technology) recently after I have read his paper which was published in 2001 in the Journal of Climate to see if Prof. Mann et al did use any 'missing-data-fill-in' algorithm such as 'Expectation-Maximisation' (EM) or not. His reply was that he tried to communicate with Prof. Mann but was given vague answer to whether they (Mann et al) used such algorithm at all. In his view that it was not used at all. Now, anyone can just infer what kind of results if the analysis didn't use any 'missing-data-fill-in' algorithm as EM. Of course tha

Fourth, there was never any mention regarding the de-noising of the data. This is a standard procedure in signal processing prior to formal spectral analysis. If noise is not removed, then obviously the results is going to be skewed.

As seeing all those steps I have listed above, I concluded that the analysis was incomplete and I can infer that the results was not convincing.
Andrew, you said: "Yes, and those that make those claims are trying to get the evidence."

But how can you make a claim before you have the evidence? What truth value does any claim have when made prior to the collection of evidence. If the claim fits with already-known evidence and integrates many of them, then such a claim would be the basis of a very good hypothesis that could then go on to be tested.

But if on the other hand the claim itself is pretty much all the evidence -- such as my claim that there are green spiders on Mars -- then my claim is just arbitrary, and in the realm of knowledge it's out.

"However, I sometimes wonder if your views on some issues can ever be changed."

Oh, of course they can, but it requires evidence and sound reasoning. Just as it does with everybody else. :-)

"My point was that we can never prove man-made global warming, and that the best evidence we can possibly generate using observational research, will never be good enough for some people."

Well, if it exists, of course you can prove it. You certainly can't if it doesn't, however.

As you're saying about smoking and lung cancer, as yet (as I understand it) there's been no direct causal link found between smoking and lung cancer that might explain, for instance, why nine people will smoke like trains and be cancer-free, and one will have the occasional social puff and spend the last years of their life on an inhaler.

But even without such direct causal link being found, the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence shows that the risk to regular smokers of getting lung cancer is several orders of magnitude above what it is for non-smokers.

So there is overwhelming evidence for the claim, despite the lack of a known causal link. The evidence does suggest however that one will be found eventually.

"Now given your desire to provoke, and knowing that you smoke, you probably don't believe the conspiracy theory that smoking causes cancer."

Well, as I address the latter point in my comments above, I wonder what evidence you have for me being a smoker? ;^)
PC said...[Well, as I address the latter point in my comments above, I wonder what evidence you have for me being a smoker?]

I think Andrew means the occasional 'Port Royal' rollies that you pinch from Patrick to have a puff.
The smoking thing is a red-herring. In that case even if you have no idea of the link you have literally millions upon millions of trials conducted... all those smokers. You can slice and dice them to control for many factors and come to the conclusion that smoking is the most likely factor.

With global warming however there is only one trial and you are in the middle of it being conducted. Hence the reliance on incomplete models and extremely dodgy historical proxy methods.

The difference is very important.
'Death of a Moa' - Trevor Lloyd
Boobs. Bikes. Pictures.
Thats not Boobs on Blike thats Backs on Bikes.

Here are the Boobs, http://www.whaleoil.co.nz/node/3025
Ah yes, but this is a family blog.

Well, except of course for that last post. ;^)
Ah, I see PC is working on his google ratings again.
Berend de Boer said...[Ah, I see PC is working on his google ratings again. ]

Which is a good thing. Isn't it? What's the point of having a site that doesn't attract visitors. It is more like having a BMW in a remote island, that has only mud road, and the only inhabitant of the island is the BMW owner himself where there has never been anyone else visiting the island or expected to be in the near future.
Steven ... everyones favorite source of BZP :-)

"If you're mad - vote Berry!"
So I'm the BMW? I'm flattered. :-)
Not sure what the fuss is. It's just fleshy sacks of glands and fatty tissue adorning the chests of young women. Nothing more graphic than I haven't already seen in Papua New Guinea. Albeit, perkier...
I'm guessing whoever reads this article would appreciate this site :)

Bikes and Boobs
Rates Rant. Parental Advisory.
john fillmore contracters who rip up the pavements to relay them again just had their budget doubled bye the council so peaple can see where their moneys going,been told to lay more and faster even working on sunday!,theres the responce to complaints about high rates spend some more!!
Fillmores made a very nice job of laying the pavement in our street, which to be fair was also very nice before they ripped it up and relaid it, and we only lost phone, power and internet access twice.

The road they cut up to lay the new pavement looks rather less attractive however.

Nothing a few more thousand dollars of our money won't fix though.
So what's up with the random 'Head' logo at the side? Is it there simply to subtly imply Dick is a, er, dickhead?
What's the deal?
Viva la republica! How'd I miss this little snippet of republicanism? I blame the pic above this post...
Balls tampering
The illiterate teaching illiteracy
PC said...[STUFF: "NZQA figures show nearly 30 per cent of enrolled level-one NCEA pupils did not achieve the minimum literacy standard last year."]

So, what should be the satisfacotry percentage? 20% , 15% , 10% or 5% ?
Milton Friedman likes Don Brash
Milton might like Don because he's his long lost evil twin... The resemblance is scary! Or do all economists bald and bespeckled?
I'm pretty sure George Riesman has all his own hair and his own eyes. But he's also exceptional for other reasons. :-)
the Zimbabwean government are doing a superb job of late to promote the benefits of central banking

I see new vehicle sales are down in the U.S (classic sign of slowdown) and looks like their housing market is fizzling, interesting to see what happens next
The under-endowed Overlander
PC, I thought exactly the same thing last night while watching the news where the NZ version of the Greenham Common women were ensconced at Wgtn station getting signatures to 'save the train'.

If, as Jeanette earnestly said, the train is 'essential', (Greenie-Reds love that word, eh), there should be no shortage of investors willing to put up their money to save it.

I reiterate: *their* money; not mine.
I wonder if anyone will notice that "Myra Mains" signs a lot of Green Party petitions?
I've been on the train when it took 10 hours to make the trip both during the day and at nighttime.

The trip took too long, the seats were uncomfortable, and the food was bad.

This is why no one including Jeanette and Sue use the Overlander."This is why no one including Jeanette and Sue use the Overlander."

I don't think either Sue or Jeanette use The Overlander. They just think other people should.

"I've been on the train when it took 10 hours to make the trip both during the day and at nighttime. The trip took too long, the seats were uncomfortable, and the food was bad."

To be fair, I think the service is a lot better than it was back when Richard Prebble was saving rail. Back then there were no sleeping cars, no food or heating to speak of, few other choices for long-distance travel, and they used to regularly shake you awake in the middle of the night to check your tickets.

Those weren't the days.
Top Googling
Not a fan of Rolf Harris? Come on, you have to admit he had a talent for making the most out of very little.
Actually I take some of that back. It would appear that Rolf is actually a talented painter:

http://www.portlandgallery.com/index.php?page=rolfharris
I didn't know swedish nightclubs were not pc
Crikey, if Swedish nightclubs aren't Not PC then I dont know what would be. Perhaps a Swedish women's volleyball and mudwrestling team on their night off?
This is one of case where an anti-trust law is an asshole. SearchKing tried to sue Google for penalising their service, because they have been using an illegal tactic called 'web-farming'. It is a widely used method (search engine optimisation - SOE) by web-developers to gain high rating by the Google 'PageRank' algorithm. If SOE is done properly, then Google have no problem with it. When web-developers try to deceive the 'PageRank' algorithm in order to get a good rating, then those developers have to realise that the game had changed. Google now, tracks those who try to deceive 'PageRank' and penalise them, meaning those websites who have used such illegal tactic is de-rated by Google. Such illegal tactic as repeating a 'key-word' in a HTML page, using white text so visitors to that page don't notice this repetition since it is the same colour as the white background. Since the frequency is high for such key-word, Google PageRank increases the weight to that term and thus likely to come up high in ranking of search. I think that Google has every right to penalise those who are using web-farming tactic to deceive ‘PageRank’ because their revenue is based on place advertisement.

If SearchKing succeeded, then Google's trade secret (proprietary algorithm), would have been challenged wide open in court for everyone to see (of course to the delight of Bill Gates). This is when the anti-trust law is very damaging business. I think Annette Presley would have endorsed SearchKing's effort because Google is a monopoly in the domain of search engines.

I doubt that PC is using any Web-farming tactic to drive rating to this (NotPC) site.
'The Young Diana,' by Anna Hyatt Huntington
That is truly breathtaking.

Nice find PC.
Wasn't this the statue that was made via Bette Davis modeling for it when she was 18 yrs old?
Bullshit! at Ten
Bugger! Forgot to change the habit of a lifetime and write to the Green MP's to suggest they 'watch an interesting programme on recycling'.

I'd have paid money to have seen their faces when informed by Penn that their philosophy was bullshit and that all tax is theft.

It was superb - and I say that as somebody who has routinely recycled for decades; sometimes driving distances to do so.
It was a good episode. It reminded me of the time I was travelling home from work in Silverstream to Epuni where I lived. Decided to stop at the old Taita pub for a cold one. Just over the fence were three large plastic igloo-like bins marked "Paper" "Glass" and Metal". People dutifully came up and dumped into the appropriate bin. This council truck pulled up and proceeded to empty all three bins on top of one another.

I asked the driver where he was taking the now thoroughly mixed load of rubbish (as I had not heard that we had a recycling centre in the Hutt). He said "we just dump it at the Silverstream Tip".
Noticed google video was a bit hard to find all the Bullshit Videos in order.. I've got most of them linked through here.

http://mikeenz.blogspot.com/2006/08/penn-and-teller-bullshit.html

Can anyone tell me where the missing episodes are?
There's a slightly more complete list of episodes at Links to free episodes of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! It has a more complete fourth season and an episode from season three that mikee missed.
Welfare isn't working
McCarten finds reason in the irrational
McCarten is an idiot about just about everything - but does the right think entirely in non-sequiturs?

"If you don't support the war in (insert country), you don't support fighting terrorism"

That one is the right's favourite non-sequitur or logical fallacy - whatever.You use it all the time, and upbraid others for similar sins.

I'm just saying.
McCarten's opposition to Syrian imperialism in Lebanon is non-existent. Words cannot describe what an evil prick he is, but the lack of journalism in NZ will mean he isn't grilled on this.

Ruth you have a point, it is possible to support fighting terrorism without supporting the attack on Iraq as they were not directly related (Iraq was a matter of WMD and overthrowing a tyranny, the fact that WMDs were not found is besides the point). However, it is difficult to see how anyone can be anti-terrorism and let the Taliban continue to shelter terrorists.
Ruth, you're so far off-beam it's not worth answering this.

Virtually every word is misguided, including "all" and "the."
Sunnis shooting Shiites
Shock horror!! Overthrowing the government of an artificial, largely tribalist country, with absolutely no concrete plan for the aftermath, has led to bloodshed! How in Ayn's name could that have happened!? It was supposed to transform overnight into an enlightened oasis of reason, liberty and capitalism!!It's a conspiracy, I tell you!!

Or to put it another way: we told you so.
blah said...[Overthrowing the government of an artificial, largely tribalist country]

All countries on earth were tribalist at some stage. Some were evolving faster than others. Those which evolved faster are more prosperous than the ones that hang tight to being tribalist. It is not a bad thing to show a primitive (or tribalist) society as Irag, the way to prosperity. This can only come from countries who have abadoned tribal systems long time ago, and that is the affluent Western Countries. If the British, didn't bring their culture to NZ and the Pacific Islands, we (polynesians) would still be running around, naked with our spears. We would have nothing to do all day, except fishing or growing kumara and taro in the bush. No, schools, no hospitals, no electricity, etc.

blah said...[with absolutely no concrete plan for the aftermath, has led to bloodshed!]

In fact there was. You would be very stupid to think that there wasn't. To think that the huge task as invading a country & occupying it until it is stable enough so that the power is handed back afterwards, where the invader has no concrete plan (pre & post) is the type of thinking that is typical of anti-US . Suppose that some groups of Bosnian muslim jihadists, started bombing their own people and participating in insurgency fighting, against tens of thousands of NATO troops occupying their country, because they don't like them to stay there anymore. Also suppose that the situation in Bosnia is getting worse reaching a level similar to Irag. According to your logic, you would not jump up and say there was no plan in Bosnia, right? Can you see the difference between Bosnia & Irag? I can re-phrase what PC said: "Iraq's liberation from Saddam's tyranny left Iraqis free to succeed, free to flourish, free to make their own mistakes." Yep, when you a given freedom to choose (liberated) your destiny, you only blame yourself if you fail. If you fucked it up, it is also yourself to blame and not anyone else. The Iragi fucked it up, and not the Americans. It is not the Americans who are the suicide bombers, but WHO? The Iragi insurgents. On the other hand, the Bosnians, have used wisely the freedom that was given to them by the Americans (Nato but largely Americans) from the repression of Milosevic. Guess what, there is peace and harmony in Bosnia. The choice not to fuck up was solely theirs (Bosnians) and not the occupying force. Can you spot the difference?

We are all humans and we make mistakes all the time and the US are no exception. The mistake was the disbanding of the Iragi army, by Paul Bremmer. There was a very concrete plan during the war and after the war. It has been admitted by some senior US officials that those who are participating in the insurgencies , were ex-army people with no jobs after the army was being disbanded. Mr Bremmer should have left the army intact. The process of de-bathification of the army should have been done in steps. Purge top commanders (generals) and made them redundant, after a few months, say 5, 6 or whatever. Purge the next level of army ranking officers then promote younger ones as they might have not been a full bathist membership. This purging and promotion of officers plus recruting new ones could have avoided such a mess that is happening right now. However, it is the Iragis themselves to blame and not Paul Bremmer. Do you read your history and notice a pattern about dictators? YES. All dictators I am aware of, including Saddam , use this method. They get to power with his own group, purged top generals, and promoted their own sympathisers. They (dictators) didn't not disband a whole army, so those countries were stable but not free. The process of purging and promotion took a few years. They (dictators) even purged those loyalists who were part of the original coup. Castro did that, Stalin did that, Mao did that, Idi Amin did that, and many more.

blah said...[Or to put it another way: we told you so.]

Who's we?
Breakfast with Wayne - debating the 90-day Probationary Employment Bill
Nah,Every new political party needs a sour, bitter, angry and disenfranchised underclass to be its activist group if it is ever going to make it into the big time.
Spot on, anon. Even Pita Sharples seems to have changed his mind. Actually creating opportunities for Maori would mean they couldn't default to victim status whenever it suits.Peter, Were any Maori employers there? Any viewpoint expressed?
Breakfast with Sue Bradford & Ruth Dyson? And you didn't choke on your cornies?!

I tend to agree with both anon & Lindsay. Talk's cheap - especially from politicians - and even taking into account Tariana Turia's speech to this yr's Act conf stating that (and I'm paraphrasing) welfare was detrimental to Maori.

I might be less skeptical when she and Sharples actually *do* something, but I'm not holding my breath. Specially as they're part of the govt.

Incidentally, were they there, PC?
Ah, so cynical in ones so young. :-)

"Were any Maori employers there? Any viewpoint expressed?"

If there were, they were very quiet about it.
"Incidentally, were they there, PC?"

Nope, just the four pollies, all of whom headed for the planes as soon as breakfast was over.

BTW, Sue Bradford got in a good dig as she left. Leaving just as Dyson got up to close, Dyson noticed her and told the crowd she and Bradford were on the same plane. "But I'm driving myself," shot back Bradford.

And Rodney got in a few good digs, including beginning his speech by thanking all the taxpayers there for paying all four of the MPs wages, and for Labour's election spending.

Do you include the Libertarianz in your comments?
Nearly all companies have the 90 day probationary period written into employee contracts - all corporates do, and in my recent research I have discovered most 'blue collar' businesses do as well - so why enshrine it into law and tie employers hands?

Why would a libertarian support such a thing?
Ruth said "Nearly all companies have the 90 day probationary period written into employee contracts".

I've never seen one in all my years and from my discussions with HR consultants 90-day "probationary periods" are illegal. So there is a need for a law change."Do you include the Libertarianz in your comments?"

Blah, I think Anon is right. But by the time people realise we're right about government doing you over, sadly they've already been been done over. :-/

"Nearly all companies have the 90 day probationary period written into employee contracts - all corporates do, and in my recent research I have discovered most 'blue collar' businesses do as well..."

Well, your experiences are virtually unique, I'd suggest. None of the employers there yesterday suggested the Bill was unnecessary as you could presently write in a probationary period, and Ruth Dyson who said the law presently allowed you to was told in no uncertain terms by Susan-Jane Davies that "the reference to probationary employment in section 67 of the Employment Relations Act is virtually useless. Nothing in that section prevents employees from raising a personal grievance against their employer for unjustified or constructive dismissal during probation. This means that the existing law fails to provide a genuine probationary period."

So perhaps some companies do write in a probationary period, but it's not entirely clear that the Employment Court would support such a thing.

"... so why enshrine it into law and tie employers hands? Why would a libertarian support such a thing?"

Is this a serious question?

First of all, the Bill proposes an optional probationary period.

Second, do you really want to know why a libertarian would want to get the government out of the boardroom, even for only ninety days?

Are you sure this isn't Ruth Dyson I'm speaking to here?
Khalifa Sports Center Tower - Roger Taillibert
Nicole Kidman is hot
'Mel Gibson was not among the 85 signatories'.

Nor Vanessa Redgrave?!
I didn't know they were making a movie, Kidman would be better suited than Jolie, both physically and philosophically
I'm in love!!!!!!
More drugs, less crime?
When I was living in Colombia, the price for 1 gram of pure Cocaine was USD 5. It was everywhere and it might as well have been free. Hence there was no need to commit crime to feed any habit that someone might have.

Despite it being widely available, very few Colombians were consuming this drug. Violence from illegal drugs came from other sources such as paramilitary/guerilla/drug cartel groups, who had to resort to violence as the only means to protect their turf or enforce their contracts. (Since they could not apply for legal remedy).

And the main source of violence and crime was the result of the US (and Colombian) government's execution of the drug war. And as I mentioned on another thread, many of the victims are innocent.

Remove the profits from the drug trade through legalisation and these violent groups will be competed out of the market and they will take their crime and violence with them.

Julian
And here is some more evidence as to the futile nature of the drug war. This article from today's New York Times and reprinted in the IHT.

www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/19/america/web.0819coca.php

Julian
The success of NZ's methadone programme lies mainly in crime reduction. Again, quasi-legalisation of heroin (through a opiate substitute) lowers crime.The methadone programme (administered by your local pharmacy) is so often overlooked as a glaring contradiction in how we generally approach drugs.
Dov Fisks Fisk
Darnton on air
Were Maori environmentalists?
I think the case is pretty clear that Maori were unsustainable in their farming and hunting methods used from the time they settled. The question is: did they learn from their mistakes in more recent pre-European times? Did Maori realise that they had destroyed their food source with previous plundering and came up with a sustainable approach to their use of resources?

I don't know the answer to these questions, however, without private property rights I suspect the answer is no on both counts.
I don't think it is correct to say that Bolger "appeased" Maori radicals, if anything by addressing legitimate Maori grievances against the government (which in my view were within the ambit of the common law). If anything the settlement process set the radicals back, simply because the desire for Maori "independence" becomes counterproductive to making Maori (like Ngai Tahu or Tainui) better off.

Moreover, I don't think Chamberlain's appeasement was so bad. While he did give Hitler Czechoslovakia, he ensured that Britain got the Spitfire into production and had its radar systems in placed, and from 1935 presided over the massive re-armament of Britain. The man who promised "peace in our time" also ensured that Britain came through in its finest hour.
Lewis, you make some sweeping statements.

Legitimate tribal grievances should have the right to be heard in a regular court of law, not the Waitangi Tribunal, which is a kangaroo court. Secondly, I wonder at the 'full & final' bit of the pay-outs. I understand that either Tainui or Ngai Tahu (sorry, can't remember which and can't lay my hands on the book) have now received 4 over the last century, the third being some 300,000 pounds (during wartime to boot) via Peter Fraser and called 'full & final'. Which means I won't be at all surprised if the likes of Syd Jackson's great-grandkids have another go in 50 yrs time 'for being rorted in the mid-90's'.

And as for Neville Chamberlain, oy vey. After having his head in the sand with regard to Hitler's activities, he finally got his bum into gear when his own was on the line. 'Massive re-arming'? Sebastian Faulks has written that British aircraft got down to dangerously low figures during the Battle of Britain, despite the prowess of the Allied aviators.

Goering decided that his information was wrong and changed tack at was what pretty much the eleventh hour for Britain, buying Churchill some time.

Spkg of Churchill, he defined an appeaser as such: Someone who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.

Food for thought, eh.
Walking through an empty city
"They are weapon's of terror"